South Wind Part 39

The millionaire remarked:

"I suppose the human outlook has shifted with the years. Democracy hyas changed your old point of view."

"a.s.suredly. No American, no modern of any race, I fancy, can divest himself of the notion that one man is as good as another; in the eyes of G.o.d, they add--meaning in their own eyes. No Greek, no ancient of any race, I fancy, could have burdened himself with so preposterous a delusion. Democracy has killed my point of view. It has subst.i.tuted progress for civilization. To appreciate things of beauty, as do the Americans, a man requires intelligence. Intelligence is compatible with progress. To create them, as did the Greeks, he requires intelligence and something else as well: time. Democracy, in abolishing slavery, has eliminated that element of time--an element which is indispensable to civilization."

"We have some fine slavery in America at this moment."

"I am using the word in the antique sense. Your modern slavery is of another kind. It has all the drawbacks and few of the advantages of the cla.s.sic variety. It gives leisure to the wrong people--to those who praise the dignity of labour. Men who talk about the Dignity of Labour had better say as little as possible about civilization, for fear of confusing it with the North Pole."

The American laughed.

"That's one for me!" he remarked.

"On the contrary! You are an admirable example of that happy graft which we mentioned just now."

"Progress and civilization!" exclaimed Mr. Heard. "One uses those words so much in my walk of life that, thinking it over, I begin to wonder whether they mean more than this: that there are perpetual readjustments going on. They are supposed to indicate an upward movement, some vague step in the direction of betterment which, frankly, I confess myself unable to perceive. What is the use of civilization if it makes a man unhappy and unhealthy? The uncivilized African native is happy and healthy. The poor creatures among whom I worked, in the slums of London, are neither the one nor the other; they are civilized. I glance down the ages, and see nothing but--change! And perhaps not even change. Mere differences of opinion as to the value of this or that in different times and places."

"Pardon me! I was using the words in a specific sense. What I mean by progress is the welding together of society for whatever ends. Progress is a centripetal movement, obliterating man in the ma.s.s. Civilization is centrifugal; it permits, it postulates, the a.s.sertion of personality. The terms are, therefore, not synonymous. They stand for hostile and divergent movements. Progress subordinates. Civilization co-ordinates. The individual emerges in civilization. He is submerged in progress."

"You might call civilization a placid lake," said the American, "and the other a river or torrent."

"Exactly!" remarked Mr. Heard. "The one is static, the other dynamic.

And which of the two, Count, would you say was the more beneficial to humanity?"

"Ah! For my part I would not bring such consideration to bear on the point. We may deduce, from the evolution of society, that progress is the newer movement, since the State, which welds together, is of more recent growth than the individualistic family or clan. This is as far as I care to go. To debate whether one be better for mankind than the other betrays what I call an anthropomorphic turn of mind; it is therefore a problem which, so far as I am concerned, does not exist. I content myself with establishing the fact that progress and civilization are incompatible, mutually exclusive."

"Do you mean to say," asked the millionaire, "that it is impossible to be progressive and civilized at the same time?"

"That is what I mean to say. Now if America stands for progress, this old world may be permitted--with a reasonable dose of that flattery which we accord to the dead--to represent civilization. Tell me, Mr. van Koppen, how do you propose to amalgamate or reconcile such ferociously antagonistic strivings? I fear we will have to wait for the millennium."

"The millennium!" echoed Mr. Heard. "That is another of those unhappy words which are always cropping up in my department."

"Why unhappy?" asked Mr. van Koppen.

"Because they mean nothing. The millennium will never come."

"Why not?"

"Because n.o.body wants it to come. They want tangible things. n.o.body wants a millennium."

"Which is very fortunate," observed the Count. "For if they did, the Creator would be considerably embarra.s.sed how to arrange matters, seeing that every man's millennium differs from that of his neighbour.

Mine is not the same as yours. Now I wonder, Mr. van Koppen--I wonder what your millennium would be like?"

"I wonder! I believe I never gave it a thought. I have had other things to puzzle out."

And the millionaire straightway proceeded to think, in his usual clear-cut fashion. "Something with girls in it," he soon concluded, inwardly. Then aloud:

"I guess my millennium would be rather a contradictory sort of business. I should require tobacco, to begin with. And the affair would certainly not be complete, Count, without a great deal of your company.

The millennium of other people may be more simple. That of the d.u.c.h.ess, for example, is at hand. She is about to join the Roman Catholic Church."

"That reminds me," said Mr. Heard. "She gave me some remarkable tea-cakes not long ago. Delicious. She said they were your specialty."

"You have found them out, have you?" laughed the American. "I always tell her that once a man begins on those tea-cakes there is no reason on earth, that I can think of, why he should ever stop again. All the same, I nearly overate myself the other day. That was because we had a late luncheon on board. It shall never occur again--the late luncheon, I mean. Have you discovered, by the way, whether the business of Miss Wilberforce has been settled?"

Mr. Heard shook his head.

"Is that the person," enquired the Count, "who is reported to drink to excess? I have never spoken to her. She belongs presumably to the lower cla.s.ses--to those who extract from alcohol the pleasurable emotions which we derive from a good play, or music, or a picture gallery."

"She is a lady."

"Indeed? Then she has relapsed into the intemperance of her inferiors.

That is not pretty."

"Temperance!" said the bishop. "Another of those words which I am always being obliged to use. Pray tell me, Count, what you mean by temperance."

"I should call it the exercise of our faculties and organs in such a manner as to combine the maximum of pleasure with the minimum of pain."

"And who is the judge of what const.i.tutes the dividing line between use and abuse?"

"We cannot do better, I imagine, than go to our own bodies for an answer to that question. They will tell us exactly how far we may proceed with impunity."

"In that case," said the millionaire, "if you drink a little too much occasionally--only occasionally, I mean!--you would not call that intemperance?"

"Certainly not. We are not Puritans here. We do not give wrong names to things. What you suggest would be by the way of a change, I presume--like the eating of a pike: something we do not indulge in every day. If I were to come home a little joyful now and then, do you know what these people would say? They would say: 'The old gentleman is pleased to be merry to-night. Bless his heart! May the wind do him good.' But if I behaved as Miss Wilberforce is reported to do, they would say: 'That old man is losing self-control. He is growing intemperate. Every evening! It is not a pretty sight.' They never call it wrong. Their mode of condemnation is to say that it is not pretty.

The ethical moment, you observe, is replaced by an aesthetic one. That is the Mediterranean note. It is the merit of the Roman Church that she left us some grains of common sense in regard to minor morals."

The bishop remarked:

"What I have seen of the local Catholicism strikes me as a kind of pantomime. That is the fault of my upbringing, no doubt."

"Oh, I am not referring to externals! Externally, of course, our Church is the purest rococo--"

Mr. Heard was expanding in this congenial atmosphere; he felt himself in touch with permanent things. He glanced at the speaker. How charming he looked, this silvery-haired old aristocrat! His ample and gracious personality, his leisurely discourse--how well they accorded with the environment! He suggested, in manner, the secret of youth and all that is glad, unclouded, eternal; he was a reflection, a belated flower, of the cla.s.sic splendour which lay in ruins about him. Such a man, he thought, deserves to be happy and successful. What joy it must have been to a person of his temperament--the chance discovery of the Locri Faun!

A great stillness brooded upon the enclosure beyond. The shadows had shifted. Sunny patches lay, distributed in fresh patterns, upon the old brickwork flooring. An oval shaft of light, glinting through the foliage, had struck the pedestal of the Faun and was stealthily crawling up its polished surface. He looked at the statue. It was still slumbering in the shade. But a subtle change had spread over the figure, or was it, he wondered, merely a change in the state of his own mind, due to what the Count had said? There was energy, now, in those tense muscles. The slightest touch, he felt, would unseal the enchantment and cause life to flow through the dull metal.

Mr. van Koppen was slightly ruffled.

"Are you not a little hard on the Puritans?" he asked. "Where would we have been without them in America?"

"And after all," added the bishop, "they cleared up an infinity of abuses. They were temperate, at all events! Too temperate in some matters, I am inclined to think; they did not always allow for human weakness. They went straight back to the Bible."

The Count shook his head slowly.

"The Bible," he said, "is the most intemperate book I have ever read."

"Dear me!"

Mr. van Koppen, a tactful person, scented danger ahead. He remarked: